Ensemble Meirion

He was born in Brighton in 1879 and started to play the violin with lessons from his father and later played in music-hall orchestras which his father conducted. He entered the Royal College of Music in 1896 at the age of 17 where he studied violin and piano and later won a scholarship to study composition for another four years with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.

In 1903 Bridge began to earn his living as a violin and viola player and as a teacher. He was a member of three string quartets – for more than 17 years a member of the English String Quartet - and regularly coached student chamber groups at the Royal College of Music.

In 1904, he took part in the British première of Debussy’s String Quartet and in 1913 he played in a performance of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro with the composer directing. Bridge also took part in a performance of one of the Fauré piano quartets with the composer as pianist.

In addition to his freelance work as an orchestral player Bridge was much in demand as a conductor. He was rehearsal director of the New Symphony Orchestra and at London’s Savoy Theatre during its 1910-11 season, he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra and stepped in for Henry Wood at the Proms. He was described by Herbert Howells as a conductor who: "… more than any man in recent musical history, could survive with dignity, and even with profit, the ordeal of conductor-proxy, and leave his compatriots wondering why it was so often necessary for a celebrity’s toothache to be the ridiculously inadequate reason for our having the opportunity to hear a naturally endowed native conductor."

In 1911 he composed his suite The Sea, which became very popular and frequently appeared in Promenade concert programmes. The String Sextet which is being performed tonight was written between 1906 and 1912.

After the Great War Bridge’s musical style moved in new directions but audiences preferred his earlier music. In the 1920s he conducted some of his works in Boston, Cleveland, Detroit and New York and the wealthy benefactress Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge became his patron. He went to live with his wife in Friston, near Eastbourne, where he wrote most of his later works. He died suddenly in 1941 at the age of sixty one.

Peter J. Pirie in his book on Frank Bridge writes:

"His is the night side of things, a nocturnal poetry uncanny and unequivocal, compound of that gentle magic of moths, owls and night-scented flowers so distinctively English. His developing technique emphasised this aspect of his art, but scattered among his works are a number of daylight ones too – in which the peculiar combination of thyme and distant sea, of the glitter of sun upon waves, is evident..."

PQM

Your poems have had a decisive influence on my musical development. Because of them, for the first time, I found myself compelled to seek a new sound in poetry, that is to say I found it without seeking it, by reflecting musically on those things your verses stirred up in me.

Arnold Schönberg, letter to Richard Dehmel, 1912.

Schönberg had set several of Jugendstil author, Richard Dehmel’s poems for voice and piano, when, in the Summer of 1899, he turned to Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) from the collection Weib und Welt (Woman and World) and used it as the ‘narrative’ of his Opus 4 tonepoem for string sextet.

This collection of poetry had caused a scandal, on both moral and religious grounds, when it first appeared, and Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht was, initially at least, to fare little better. In 1899 (the year of Debussy’s Nocturnes and Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante Défunte) the 25 year old Schönberg, as yet neither ‘atonal’ expressionist nor ‘serial’ classicist, was still immersed in the highly chromatic language of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Verklärte Nacht, both poem and tonepoem, belongs in this world of night and doomed lovers, but the music takes Wagner’s language so near to its tonal limits that one unsympathetic critic described the work sounding as if ‘someone had smeared the ink of the score of Tristan over the page while it was still wet’. Worse still, Schönberg committed the cardinal sin, in the view of one Viennese music society at least, of writing (three times!) a dissonance –

a chord of the 9th in its 4th inversion (with the 9th in the bass) that had, as yet, not been classified by theoreticians. Even the board of the Viennese Tonkünstlerverein, under whose auspices it was eventually given its first performance, at first rejected it and then changed their minds.

Despite these vicissitudes, Verklärte Nacht was given its premiere on March 18th, 1902 by the Rosé Quartet augmented by two members of the Vienna Philharmonic, one of whom was the composer/’cellist Franz Schmidt.

The work, with its complex textures and almost orchestral climaxes, makes great technical demands on the performers. Schönberg tacitly acknowledged that it might benefit from the use of greater forces when, in 1917, he arranged the piece for string orchestra, subsequently re-working this version in 1943. While, in its orchestral form, it remains the composer’s most performed work; it can be argued that the original sextet version with its sense of pushing both players and chamber music itself to the very edge, is truer to the spirit of Dehmel’s poem.

The music follows the poem quite closely. It is, like the poem, divided into five ‘verses’: two larger sonata-like movements correspond to the speeches of the woman and the man, while three shorter sections (prelude, interlude and coda) relate to stanzas one, three and five. It is interesting that ‘reflecting musically’ on Dehmel’s poem leads to the conclusion that the speeches of both protagonists lend themselves to sonata-like structures. There is a complicated motific inter-relationship throughout the piece that is well beyond the scope of even an extended programme note.

Schönberg himself became increasingly embarrassed by the programme of Verklärte Nacht, arguing (justifiably) that it could survive in its own right as abstract music. The following, then, is not for those who would prefer to hear it that way.

The sextet opens with a depiction of the ‘bare, cold grove’. A reiterated descending scalic figure marked immer leise (always quietly) dominates until, with the instruction Etwas bewegter (a little faster), the woman’s speech begins.

The music, almost immediately, reaches its first climax (‘I am carrying a child, and not of yours’) and then sinks back to piano (via the first appearance of the proscribed chord of the ninth). The first viola leads to a short pause that allows all six instruments to be muted. A new melody appears (mit schmerzlichem ausdrucksvoll (with sorrowful expression)) as the woman tells how she no longer believed in happiness and of her search for purpose in her life. The music reflects this sad restlessness, moving rapidly from key to key, pointing constantly to the minor mode and becoming more and more agitated until, suddenly (the second climax), with the idea of ‘motherhood’ (Breiter (Broadly)) it bursts into the light of E-major. In this and the bittersweet section that follows (Etwas ruhiger (a little quieter)), we find in the score, for the first time, the word dolce (sweetly), as the woman thinks of the joys and responsibilities of parenthood. This idyll does not last: the music becomes increasingly disturbed (Drägend, etwas unruhiger … rascher werdend (Pressing forward, less peaceful … becoming faster)) until we arrive at the woman’s sexual encounter with the stranger. We hear her shuddering horror and fear, and an angular figure, which initially appears double forte high in the first violin, marked wild, leidenschaftlich (wild, impassioned), gradually dominates the music. The high-point of this section now occurs as, her story nearly ended, she comes back to the fact of her pregnancy and the music of the opening climax returns (this time treble-, as distinct from double forte). As before the music sinks back, passing the second appearance of the chord of the ninth, but this time accompanying a ‘broken’ version her ‘sorrowful, expressive’ theme.

The third ‘verse’ brings the re-appearance of the descending theme of the ‘bare, cold, grove’ but now heavy accents (Schwer betont) tell us of the woman’s ‘awkward step’. Although the music rises (as she looks up and the moon irradiates her face with light) it eventually settles onto a quiet, dark, anticipatory chord of E-flat minor.

The change of key (to D-major) and dynamic (to forte) as the man’s voice speaks comes as quite a shock. The masculine, tenor voice of the ’cello sings his first theme as the music moves towards transformation. As he exclaims ‘O see, how brightly the universe gleams! There is a radiance on everything’ we find ourselves transported to a magical, shimmering, harmonic-spangled world of F-sharp major, a melody which the first violin plays ‘intimately, very tenderly and softly’ and a serene mood that only darkens for a moment when the strings produce the soft smooth sound of sul tasto (playing on the fingerboard) for the line ‘you drift with me on a cold sea’. The ardent, Tristanesque ‘duet’ of the lovers’ ‘special warmth’ follows, culminating in the man’s declaration that their love ‘will transfigure the other’s child’ (treble forte, followed by a crescendo!). True to the sonata principle which underlies both the woman’s and the man’s music, the ‘masculine’ ’cello theme now returns succeeded by the transformation music (now in D-major). In this section (Sehr ruhig (Very Peaceful)) Schönberg writes a wonderful motific summation of the work as themes associated with the man, the woman and the unborn child seemingly float in the warmth of D-major.

The lovers embrace to the same music that marked the love-transfiguration of the child. Now, for the third and last time, the music sinks back and the chord of the ninth appears. The motif of the grove, in D-major and neither bare nor cold leads to the iridescent ending: ‘Two people walk through the vast clear night’.

CRW

1. Allegro ma non troppo 2. Andante ma moderato
3. Scherzo (Allegro molto) 4. Rondo (Poco allegretto e grazioso)

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) completed the String Sextet No.1 in Bb major Opus 18, his first chamber work without piano, in 1860. It is scored for two violins, two violas and two ’cellos. The self-critical twenty-seven year old’s use of the string sextet was probably due to his reluctance to write for string quartet, a medium employed to such effect by his great predecessor Beethoven.

The use of two ’cellos gave Brahms the opportunity to write the bass line in the second cello part and give much of the melody to the first ’cello. In fact the first ’cello often leads the ensemble rather than the first violin and this scoring colours the sextet as a whole.

The lyrical first movement starts with the first theme on the first ’cello, the second is a set of six variations on a theme in D minor (Brahms arranged this movement for piano, presenting it to Clara Schumann on her birthday, 13 September 1860). The third movement is a short, fast scherzo with a trio which returns in the coda. The longest movement is the finale which begins with a statement of the first theme on the first ’cello before it is taken up by the first violin, and uses much material from the opening movement.

Brahms later arranged the sextet for piano four hands and his friend Theodor Kirchner transcribed both the Bb major and the G major String Sextet No.2 Op.36 for piano trio in 1883.

The premiere of the First Sextet was given on 20 October 1860 in Hanover, under the leadership of Joseph Joachim. Invited to attend Brahms responded: ‘I’m somewhat nervous about the long and sentimental piece’.

PQM

The second surprise was the power and beauty of the music that can be produced by a string sextet. Beginning with Frank Bridge’s String Sextet, composed at the beginning of the last century, we were treated to rich harmonic sequences interspersed by the sounds of the nocturnal wildlife of the English countryside. The only complaint of the music was that there seemed to be little development over the three movements. In this respect, Bridge was thoroughly upstaged by Arnold Schönberg. Many of us in the audience had braced ourselves for a challenging thirty minutes of atonality. What we were unprepared for was Verklärte Nacht, a tremendous tonepoem. Another evocation of night life, this time it is a dream-like enactment of a man and a pregnant woman establishing an understanding about sex and parenthood in a cold moonlit grove. As the informative programme notes tell us, Wagner was the musical inspiration behind this but more in the interplay between voices rather than in orchestral drama. The rich variety of exchanges between violins, violas and cellos were a challenge that the six musicians handled with relish and virtuosity.